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Honest Android Games

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230 pointsshawndumas67 comments

It is interesting how most of the games look like ports of old PC games (not a critique, just noticing). I suppose this underscores the sad state into which the "modern" game developer studios have maneuvered themselves.

This may just be a function of the blogger's particular interest.

The sad thing is that while I spend about 1000 a year on non-mobile gaming and 300 a year on mobile-gaming (DS), the phone/tablet market gets exactly 0 of this because either everything really sucks or I am just unable to find anything that does not cause me to uninstall the game in disgust after playing it for 3 minutes.

And it's pretty unnecessary; I would be happy with something like HoMM2 or a successor to Master of Magic, which would fit the tablet form factor and user experience perfectly.

...HoMM2...

I'm actually surprised I figured this one out (unless it's not Heroes of Might and Magic 2)... a lot of the younger people here probably wouldn't. Might be one of those titles to write all the way out and possibly send some interested parties on an internet quest for further information. :)

HoMM is not a dead franchise - 6 was released in 2012, though perhaps not with the same kind of cultural impact as the first 3 (or 4 depending on who you ask) games since the studio change.

I've played most of them, and the only one I still play is HoMM III (Complete). It's more enjoyable, somehow. Don't know why.

Though the world generation sometimes had... issues.

I actually prefer the slightly older version, without all of the expansion packs - I think they broke some of the balance of the game making those changes.

Modern smartphones just aren't really good gaming platforms. That's sad though, because all that computing power could support good games, but most of the mobile games are quite boring. Compare this to 2004-2006 period when Java games for dumbphones were popular - I remember playing a few really good ones. I think the key difference is that dumbphones had keys and were more like an actual controller. With touchscreens the situation is very different. I tried playing some NES games on an emulator, but the controls were awful. The "draw the keys on the screen" approach clearly doesn't work when it comes to games. Yes, there are special controllers that you can buy and use with your phone, but mobile game designers can't assume that everyone will have them, and they have to design their games with the touchscreen limitations in mind, which leads to games being not very interesting.

I don't know that it's worse—more different. Maybe there are particular genres of action games which are not possible, but games like cut-the-rope, angry birds, flight control, etc, wouldn't be possible with a console controller either.

The genre that really feels unexplored in my view is long-form adventure games—touch feels like a natural fit for a game whose structure is "go there, now there, observe, repeat". This is what Republique was supposed to be about—it's supposed to be excellent; perhaps if it is a commercial success, others will follow.

Well, for what its worth you'll find a number of adventure games for tablets - Monkey Island was redone for iOS, and there's some other good ones here:

http://www.adventuregamers.com/topgames/view/iphone_and_ipad

I bought Year Walk yesterday and so far it's engaging, though I've only given it about 20 minutes so far.

However, I weep for the loss of buttons. It's sad that my favorite Android devices was an HTC Touch Pro 2 (a Windows Mobile 6.5 device!) running a custom Android rom. The keyboard was to die for.

I think your analysis is spot on, although HoMM 2 (which your parent poster is talking about) would be perfectly playable on a tablet/iphone, since it's not fast paced and most interaction could be done by tapping.

I'd love to see HoMM 2, too.

There are a couple of genres that work really, really well with touchscreens. Unfortunately, they're not really in vogue right now. Turn-based strategy is one; Skulls of the Shogun is a good example, as is Frozen Synapse. Bullet hell shmups are, surprisingly, another. Check out Danmaku Unlimited 2: it's one of the few iOS-native games that compelled me to keep playing for more than an hour. http://doragongames.com/danmaku2/

Because I only have time time to play games on the comute to work, for the last year or so, I game almost exclusively on my nexus 7.

Finding a decent game is difficult and there are not as many, but I have found a few, mostly in 3-10$ range:

Total War Batles - nice simplified rts Anomaly Warzone Earth/Korea/2 - nice strategy, reverse towerdefense

Shadowrun Returns - direct port of pc-game, nice classic tactical rpg

Deus Ex - The Fall - as long as I play it as a point and click and forget that it is supposed to be a FPS, it is pretty decent :)

I am still searching for something aking to Homam, but so far not as lucky ... there is Kings Bounty, but it is F2P, and I need something without internet conection requrement. Then I tried several ports of Battle For Wesnoth, but it port has barely some optimization of the ui to be used on touch screen ...

What about great games that have completely optional IAP? I'm currently playing through Bad Piggies (by Rovio), and the IAPs are only there to make the levels easier (which defeats the whole purpose of the game IMO, but nobody is forcing you). I'm OK with other people paying if they want to get to the end faster, as it has no impact on my way of playing.

That still gives game makers perverse incentives. They'll profit more if they make their levels too hard and too annoying. No matter how much they claim to do the right thing, there's no real way to prove it either way, and the presence of the perverse incentive ensures that most game makers in that situation will do the wrong thing.

So no, that would defeat the point of this. If perverse incentives are not removed, they will pervert things.

I've been heavily playing Counterstrike: Global Offensive lately, and I've found that it has truly honest, unbiased IAP. You can buy skins for weapons that make them look cooler, and high-end skins will also add StatTrak, which let's you see how many kills you managed with a given weapon. That's it.

You can get the same items via play, but there's a thriving real-money market around them, with items ranging from cents to hundreds of dollars.

IAP isn't the enemy; shitty games that exist solely to make money are the enemy.

Valve has been the canonical example of 'honest' IAP for a while; sadly they're starting to enter scum territory. Their recent Snow Globe promotion leveraged a lot of evil psychological trickery and misleading information to simultaneously maximize how much money people were spending while minimizing the value they got out of it. It's no surprise that as soon as the promotion was over they expunged all traces of it from their website...

what exactly did snow globe sale/cards do that was so evil? I saw it, and just completely ignored it.

To summarize it: the snow globes were a limited supply promotional item with vaguely-stated mechanics and an unstated expiration date.

They encouraged people to do certain things to generate snow globes, and made it possible for some people to stockpile them in advance. Then with about 24 hours notice, they announced that all snow globes were going to be permanently removed from users' inventories, which drove the steam marketplace price of snowglobes up dramatically as people went about trading them to try and complete sets of snowglobes. When they finally got killed some of them were trading for as much as $5 USD each.

All this for cards that literally don't do anything: The only use was to collect a set of 12, which would give you a chance at a random item from a list of utterly worthless decorative goodies (the list had a FEW good, valuable items on it, but only a few), mostly from games nobody plays.

Eh? I remember the snow globe page specifically saying that the cards would be removed at the end of the sale right when the sale started. It was why my interest wasn't that high.

But then the success of a game depends on the developers ability to produce new cosmetic items that people want.

Valve has solved this by crowd-sourcing cosmetic items through the community. In Team Fortress 2 (which uses the same kind of skin/item system as Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive) 90% of the items have come from the community, who then also get to share in the profits [1].

[1]: http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2014/1/16/5316248/on-average-...

IAP isn't the enemy; shitty games that exist solely to make money are the enemy.

Exactly right. IAP has absolutely enabled really, really bad behavior, but it's not the cause any more than the existence cars is the cause of automobile accidents. One facilitates but does not imply the other.

Kingdom Rush, and the followup Kingdom Rush Frontiers, both have strictly optional consumables and permanent heroes you can buy, and are absolutely fantastic games available on Play, Amazon, iTunes, and in Flash (for free!) at http://www.armorgames.com/.

I've seen a couple of free-to-play games where you collect in-game currency to buy powerups, and the currency accrues at a somewhat less than satisfactory rate (not "3 months of grinding to get one item," just a bit slower than you'd like), and you can buy packs of currency with IAP, but you can also pay like $3-$5 to permanently double your pickup rate. So the people who are willing to pay $20 or $50 or $100 to have everything right now can do so, and the people who just want to pay a few bucks and get a complete game also have that option.

There's still problems with it, but I like it better than most pay-to-win shit.

In principle I would agree, but I suppose this would only work for successful publishers.

Nice. I'd like to see this for Apple Store too.

Obvious features that are needed:

Categorization Sortability (price, category, price+category, rating, etc)

Keep improving. Nice first pass.

A short list by someone, with the same intent as this android list: http://www.initialsgames.com/winners/

it has category in tags.

also has paid and free tags... i don't really thing that sorting between 0.99 and 2.50 would impact much my chance of buying a game.

it mostly boils down to: 1. will i install this in a device I am comfortable inputing my credit card? if so, 0.99 or 9.99 makes no difference if it is a good game. Is this device from work/family/etc? than it must be free.

The site's organization scheme has poor discoverability. Having the categories buried inside of a list element, instead of hierarchically closer to the root, is unusual and confusing. (Yes, many blog posts have tags at the end, but many blogging platforms also have major categories/tags in a sidebar.)

Having the some of the most useful tags (platformer, puzzle, rhythm, etc.) highly visible before the listing would go a long way towards improving usability of the site.

All of that said, I am a big fan of the site's concept.

For once on HN, the same front page describing the problem has a post with the solution :)

also, beware of Ingress, it is just a miner for your data/social network.

Missing from the list, Ur-Quan Masters!

How does ingress mine my social network? It doesn't ask for any logins and doesn't have any social connections in-game as far as I can tell.

Just checked, and it has permission to read your contacts. That's nasty!

I can't guarantee it's not for anything else but the innocuous reason I can think of for this is the 'recruit agents' invite system (ingress was initially invite-only).

I think it's opened up now, but hopefully they can drop that when/if they ditch the whole recruit agents thing (no idea if they plan to do that).

That means Google (the makers of Ingress) will get access to the list of contacts I have stored in Google Contacts.

I believe I can live with that :-)

Not sure why this is a Tumblog, it should have a proper site. There's probably high demand for discovering reputable games and apps. Most Android sites are becoming bloated with old, outdated apps and info, including the Play Store.

Maybe it's just an MVP to validate interest before building a proper site.

MVP's make sense for products that require a lot of effort to build. An MVP for a blog is just horrifyingly lazy.

I would like to see a similar site for kids' apps/games. If tricky ads and IAP are bad, they are doubly bad when kids play into such tactics.

Also, these sites need to have a panel of people that rate the apps/games. A single reviewer is going to bring in bias and staleness.

Missing my personal favorite: Waking Mars. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tigerstyle...

Why would a free game with ads (and no IAP) not be "honest"? Doesn't sound right to me...

Because those are often made in such a way that during normal gameplay you will accidentally tap on the ads.

Here you go, the paid games only: http://honestandroidgames.com/tagged/paid

It completely depends on the way the ads are implemented. Some games have deceptive ads that trick you into clicking them, and some could best be described as "naggy".

Personally, even with honestly-implemented ads, I'd prefer to have the option of purchasing an ad-free version. Though I wouldn't call apps without such option "dishonest". So, I agree with you that ad-supported games can indeed by honest. If you're going to have a site named honestandroidgames.com, it seems unfair to disregard all ad-supported games.

That being said, I think this site is great!

Moreover, the ads themselves may not be honest (e.g. they might make claims of products that are untrue, misleading, etc.), and the game developer may not be in a position to verify whether they are or not. Especially if they're just 'randomly' delivered from an ad network.

The article linked from this HN discussion (in the main page at the moment) answers your question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7161901. After reading that, I totally get why you'd call these games "honest".

Why would a free game with IAP not be "honest"? Obviously, the point is not literally about honesty.

I'm not sure whether this qualifies, but I'm a huge fan:

* free demo with IAP: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ru.jecklandin....

* full version: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zalivka.an...

You can create cartoons with that. I could imagine more polish on that, but it is still better then anything else I found.

Nice! In light of how many fake ad-infested copies of every new game there seem to appear on Google Play, something like this was bound to pop up. I'm not sure I would exclude games which contain IPA's. Selling vanity items or accelerators -- as long as the normal game experience isn't crippled -- should not brand the game as "dishonest".

Never the less, great effort, I'll definitely use the site :-)

What about games that offer additional (similar) content for a fee? Seems like it'll be hard to draw a line without excluding some otherwise great games.

Example: Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer on IOS. It's a card game similar to Dominion. You get a large deck to start off, but can buy additional decks (which offer new game mechanics) for a fee.

I think consumable IAPs are the real problem, and that's a pretty clear definition. If an IAP unlocks something forever, I don't see the issue.

The games that were in the Humble Android Bundles seem to all fit the criteria and tend to be wortwhile. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Humble_Bundles

great idea, looks nice; consider adding a faceted search, or just general category filtering.

Compulsive, QbQbQb, and LYNE are some of the best minimalist games with calming soundtracks.

Compulsive looks nice, but it has ads.

<ahem> I've been playing it for the last two hours. The ads don't bother me at all. Apparently.

Spacechem is also really great

This is a really important site -- it's like http://darkpatterns.org/ for the Android gaming world. Many thanks to the authors.

Nice concept. Also the website's format enables easy window shopping of many games, which is great for discoverability

Nice. Also Osmos and Ridiculous Fishing were both powered by Apportable (YC 2011) to get them on Android.

Business-oriented developers like familiar languages.

Does anyone know of an alternative for iOS games?

Plague Inc. should be up there.

Aren't there 3 or 4 scenarios that you need to pay for access to?

Optional. Not necessary for the main game.

Love it. An iOS version pls?

This was needed.

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